Star of Danger by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Rick didn’t seem to care. None of the youngsters he’d met here in the Trade City seemed to care. They were Earthmen, and anything outside the Terran Zone was alien—and they couldn’t have cared less. They lived the same life they’d have lived on any Empire planet, and that was the way they wanted it.

They’d even been surprised—no, thunderstruck—to hear that he’d learned the Darkovan speech. They couldn’t imagine why. One of the teachers had been faintly sympathetic; he’d shown Larry how to make the complicated letters of the Darkovan alphabet, and even loaned him a few books written in Darkovan. But there wasn’t much time for that. Mostly he got the same schooling he’d have had on Earth. Darkover, even the light of Darkover’s red sun, was barriered out by walls and yellow earth-type lights; and the closed minds of the Terran Zone personnel were even more of a barrier.

When Rick had gone, Larry put his books away and sat scowling, thinking it over, until his father came in.

“How’s it going, Dad?”

He was fascinated by his father’s work, but Wade Montray wouldn’t talk about it much. Larry knew that his father worked in the customs office, and that his work was, in a general way, to see that no contraband was smuggled from Darkover to the Terran Zone, or vice versa. It sounded interesting to Larry, though his father kept insisting it was not much different from the work he’d done on Earth.

But today he seemed somewhat more communicative.

“How about dialing us some supper? I was too busy, today, to stop and eat. We had some trouble at the Bureau. One of the City Elders came to us, as mad as a drenched cat. He insisted that one of our men had carried weapons into the City, and we had to check it up. What happened was that some young fool of a Darkovan had offered one of the Spaceport Guards a lot of money to sell him one of his pistols and report it lost. When we checked with the man, sure enough, he’d done just that. Of course, he lost his rank and he’ll be on the next spaceship out of Darkover. The confounded fool!”

“Why, Dad?”

Wade Montray leaned his chin on his hands. “You don’t know much Darkovan history, do you? They have a thing called the Compact, signed a thousand years ago, which makes it illegal for anyone to have or to use any weapon except the kind which brings the man who uses it into the same risk as the man he attacks with it.”

“I don’t think I quite understand that, Dad.”

“Well, look. If you wear a sword, or a knife, in order to use it, you have to get close to your victim—and for all you know, he may have a knife and be better than you are at using it. But guns, shockers, blasters, atomic bombs—you can use those without taking any risk of getting hurt yourself. Anyway, Darkover signed the Compact, and before they agreed to let the Terran Empire build a spaceport here for trade, we had to give them iron-clad guarantees that we’d help them keep contraband out of Darkover.”

“I don’t blame them,” Larry said. He had heard the tales of the early planetary wars on Earth.

“Anyway. The man who bought this gun from our spaceforce guard has a collection of rare old weapons, and he swears he only wanted it as part of his collection—but nobody can be sure of that. Contraband does get across the border sometimes, no matter how careful we are. So I had quite a day trying to trace it down. Then I had to arrange for a couple of students from the medical schools here to go out into the back country on Darkover, studying diseases. We’ve arranged to admit a few Darkovans to the medical schools here. Their medical science isn’t up to much, and they think very highly of our doctors. But it isn’t easy even then. The more superstitious natives are prejudiced against anything Terran. And the higher caste Darkovans won’t have anything to do with us because it’s beneath their dignity to associate with aliens. They think we’re barbarians. I talked to one of their aristocrats today and he behaved as if I smelled bad.” Wade Montray sighed.

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